Visiting writers-in-residence give public reading

RELEASED: January 4, 2007

DANVILLE, KY—The Centre College English Program will sponsor a free poetry and fiction reading by writer Ann Cummins and poet Patrick Rosal on Jan. 11 at 7:30 p.m. in the Black Box Theatre in Grant Hall.

Born in the southern Rocky Mountain town of Durango, Colorado, Cummins writes frequently about working-class people. During the early part of the 20th century, her family migrated from County Galway, Ireland, to Colorado, where they mined silver, coal and uranium. When Cummins was nine, her father—a uranium mill worker—moved the family to Shiprock, New Mexico, in the northern part of the Navajo Indian Reservation, where she graduated high school. Although her work extends beyond her ties to the southwest, she is often drawn by landscape and custom to write about the region of her birth.

A graduate of the Johns Hopkins University and the University of Arizona writing programs, Cummins has published stories in The New Yorker, McSweeney's and The Best American Short Stories, 2002, among numerous other publications. The recipient of a Lannan fellowship, she divides her time between Oakland, California, and Flagstaff, Arizona, where she teaches creative writing at Northern Arizona University.

Rosal is the author of two full-length collections of poetry, Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive, which won the Asian American Writers Workshop Members' Choice Award, and most recently My American Kundiman. His chapbook, Uncommon Denominators, won the Palanquin Poetry Series Award from the University of South Carolina, Aiken.

In addition to being featured on several national radio programs, Rosal's work has appeared in many journals and anthologies including North American Review, The Literary Review, Pindledyboz, Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Non-Fiction, Pinoy Poetics and The Beacon Best. His poems have been honored by the annual Allen Ginsberg Awards, the Sow’s Ear Poetry Prize and the James Hearst Poetry Prize.

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